At Nesta, we’re tackling three long-term missions focused on major societal challenges in the UK. Policy change is one of our key levers for impact, including changing the food environment, lowering household energy costs and ensuring families can access a single point of access to different types of support wherever they live.

But mission-led work goes beyond making policy recommendations. Our goal is to deliver real-world outcomes like cutting carbon or reducing obesity. That means we need to close the gap between policy intent and what actually happens on the ground. The real challenge is designing policies and services that truly work in practice.

In our work, we see common challenges across these quite different policy challenges that underline why combining policy and design is important.

Firstly, the mission challenges that we are tackling are complex and systemic, requiring a variety of solutions by actors outside and inside the government - and an approach that joins up policy development with the reality of delivery. This requires us to bring more experimentation and learning into the way we work - such as test and learn approaches - and thinking across different scales of delivery as well as high-level policymaking.

Secondly, we’re an organisation outside of government but one that’s seeking to make national scale change, often through policy. How can we accelerate our progress towards achieving impact? Working on mission-style challenges requires a greater degree of cross-sector collaboration and ‘system stewarding’ skills, such as our work convening groups to develop co-ordinated low-carbon heating schemes.

And linking these, we’re also a multi-skilled organisation and want to make the most of our design and digital capabilities to maximise our impact. How does this happen in policy work?

The goal of delivering public value and social impact by developing and delivering better public policy and services isn't unique to us. Over recent years there has been a number of developments in the way government teams are making policy, with a thriving policy design community and policy labs across a number of teams, and a move to organising government around missions. There’s also a new commitment from the UK government to work more rapidly, iteratively and closely with frontline practitioners and citizens, such as through the test, learn and grow programme. Nesta has also been an influential thought leader on how to do policy differently, from the radical how report on mission-led working to ‘test and learn’.

Many of the shared principles within these approaches have been described as a practice of public design, and the UK government’s recent Public Design Evidence Review has set out a clear framework for understanding how this practice can deliver better public outcomes and the conditions needed to embed this government. Nesta contributed to this review, along with others including UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose which has reflected on the findings.

Its working definition of public design aligns with the challenges we see in our own policy work for complex challenges: 

“Good policy is not just about good ideas. It’s about understanding the people we’re aiming to support and the systems we’re trying to change. It’s about testing what works and building services and policies that are fit for the real world. That’s where design comes in.”

“Public design is an iterative process of generating, legitimising, and achieving policy intent whilst de-risking operational delivery. It involves a range of practical, creative and collaborative approaches grounded in citizens’ day-to-day experiences of - and relations to - people, objects, organisations, communities and places.”

At Nesta we think there’s currently a huge opportunity to sharpen our own public and policy design practice, leveraging our design and digital capabilities to support the government to deliver more effectively. In addition, we hope to help with the development of ‘public design’ capabilities within government.

So bringing this all together, what are we actually doing at Nesta and what do we think makes good policy practice for mission challenges in 2025? 

Nesta’s design and technology practice are collaborating with teams on a wide range of policy projects and we’re focussing on some key principles to take forward in our work. We’re building this practice as we go and collaborating with partners from other organisations and across government. We hope that a lot of these principles are common to other practitioners too. We’re thinking of these as a set of emerging principles for our practice and a focus for reflection on how we approach our policy and design work.

1. Bridge the policy-to-delivery gap

Policy ideas are often disconnected from how they’re implemented. Bridging this gap through continuous feedback and co-development helps ensure ideas are both practical and impactful. This approach also enables more joined-up work across sectors, supporting solutions that address whole problems rather than isolated fixes.

We’re applying this in our clean heat neighbourhoods programme, where area-based heating transitions are tested to shape future policy, and our health innovation partnership with Asda.

2. Make prototypes and policies together

Policy isn’t just written, it can be prototyped. We can make policies tangible and test them early on to help us build confidence or identify areas for improvement before investing heavily in a new idea. In collaborative, multi-skilled policy projects, we treat policy and prototypes as equally important and want both to evolve together through continuous feedback and learning. We know that designers bring a unique ability to move between the tangible and the systemic, from building hands-on interventions to mapping complex systems. This flexibility is crucial for navigating risk, uncertainty, and change.

We see this in our speed testing programme and our work with the UK government on the family hubs test and learn initiative, where we have rapidly trialled and refined policy in real-world settings.

3. Engage with whole systems and diverse voices

The challenges we tackle involve broad coalitions, spanning industry to communities, and lasting impact depends on ongoing engagement. Policy change gains traction through trusted relationships, frequent dialogue, and shared understanding. We see a clear opportunity to lead in more innovative forms of convening and participation, using design tools like prototypes, demos, and sensemaking artefacts to make the work of making policy more open, tangible, and inclusive. Platforms like Zeitgeist, developed by Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design are making public engagement on topics and consultation on topics from responsible AI to climate adaptation more engaging, inclusive and insightful.

4. Test assumptions across different dimensions 

Many of the challenges we face involve large-scale change unfolding in deeply personal contexts such as people’s homes, neighbourhoods, and daily lives. Through our policy and design work, we aim to take a more holistic approach by blending different ways of knowing and learning.This includes lived experience, abductive reasoning (working through ambiguity by making best guesses), and systems thinking. We focus deliberately on balance and fit, to not just optimise for a single outcome, but make proportionate progress across multiple dimensions, including impact, stakeholder-value, feasibility, viability, unintended consequences, and environmental sustainability. Tools such as our impact venture canvas and our test and learn playbook for mission-driven government share practical approaches and examples for how to do this.

5. Design for new futures

To achieve our ambitious mission goals we are envisioning, developing, and testing new policies and services that go beyond incremental change to current systems. This work requires not only technical expertise but also the ability to generate and make real entirely new ideas and systems. Design brings a distinctive set of skills that enable teams to navigate uncertainty, frame problems differently, and prototype novel solutions that might otherwise remain out of reach. In particular, making ambitious ideas a reality depends on cultivating diverse mindsets and capabilities including orientation, reframing, and abductive reasoning, that allow us to imagine what doesn’t yet exist and chart credible paths toward it.

The traditional approach to policymaking is evolving and at Nesta we want to be actively involved in supporting and building the emerging practice of public design, whether through ‘test and learn’, ‘mission-driven’ or ‘public design’. We believe this new approach is crucial for 21st-century design and public policy, and we are committed to its further development and visibility. We are actively learning from others pioneering in this space and are eager to collaborate further.

We invite government teams and pioneers globally seeking to improve policy design or share their experiences, as well as similar organisations working on design-led approaches to policy challenges, to connect with us. We are keen to learn from your insights and experiences. Get in touch with us at [email protected] or [email protected].

Moving forward, we will be sharing more about our work, including project learnings, the tools and techniques we utilise, and opportunities for designers, policymakers, and anyone interested in advancing their skills in design for complex policy challenges.

You can also join us at Policy Live in London on 11 September and join our session on exploring design techniques for policy teams.